Tacitus | Criticism

SOURCE: Hadas, Moses. Introduction to The Complete Works of Tacitus, by Tacitus, edited by Moses Hadas, translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb, pp. ix-xxii. New York: The Modern Library, 1942.

In the following essay, Hadas discusses Tacitus's life, career, and artistry and evaluates his trustworthiness as an historian.

The apparent insensitivity of the Romans to their greatest historian is an exasperating accident of our faulty tradition or a melancholy commentary upon their civilization. Until the end of the fourth century when Ammianus Marcellinus, an Antiochene Greek, undertook to write a continuation of Tacitus' histories no writer other than his own friend Pliny makes mention of him. It is true that the Emperor Tacitus (275-276 a.d.) is reported, not improbably though the authority is dubious, to have ordered that ten copies of his putative ancestor's works be made annually and that these be deposited in various...